We were so pleased for legacy UK music store HMV, when it turned up with a new iOS app last week. It seems Apple was a little bit over-excited too, having apparently mashed the approve button without really realizing what it was doing. HMV was selling music downloads via the new app, a massive ...
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/DQxka2C2HTw/BOSTON (AP) — Four days a week, David O'Donnell leads a 90-minute "Kennedy Tour" around Boston that features stops at government buildings, museums, hotels and meeting halls.
Tour-goers from throughout the United States and abroad, who may see John F. Kennedy as inspiration, martyr or Cold War hero, hear stories of his ancestors and early campaigns, the rise of the Irish in state politics, the odd fact that Kennedy was the only president outlived by his grandmother.
Yet at some point along the tour, inevitably, questions from the crowd shift from politics to gossip.
"Someone will ask, 'Did Jack Kennedy have an affair with Marilyn Monroe?' With this woman? That woman?" explains O'Donnell, who has worked for a decade in the city's visitors bureau. Those asking forgive the infidelities as reflecting another era, he says. "It's something people, in an odd way, just accept."
The Kennedy image, the "mystique" that attracts tourists and historians alike, did not begin with his presidency and is in no danger of ending 50 years after his death. Its journey has been uneven but resilient — a young and still-evolving politician whose name was sanctified by his assassination, upended by discoveries of womanizing, hidden health problems and political intrigue, and forgiven in numerous polls that place JFK among the most beloved of former presidents.
The last half century has demonstrated the transcendence of Kennedy's appeal. It's as if we needed to learn the worst before returning to the qualities that defined Kennedy at his best — the smile and the wavy hair, the energy and the confidence, the rhetoric and the promise.
"He had a gift for rallying the country to its best, most humane and idealistic impulses," says Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Robert Caro, who cites such Kennedy achievements as the Peace Corps, the nuclear test ban treaty and the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
"He's become more and more of an iconic figure as the years have passed," says presidential biographer Robert Dallek, whose "Camelot's Court" is one of many Kennedy books out this fall.
"I think it's partly, of course, because of the assassination. But that doesn't really account for why he has this phenomenal hold on the public." President William McKinley, he noted, was assassinated in 1901, "but 50 years after his death hardly anyone remembered who he was."
Boston is the official home for Kennedy memories, starting at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and echoing at landmarks throughout the area — the small, shingled house in Brookline where he was born and the Kennedy park in Cambridge that extends along the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the statue on the grounds of the Massachusetts State House and the corner table at the nearby Omni Parker House Hotel, where Kennedy proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier.
But thousands of Kennedy buildings, busts and plaques can be found around the country, from the grandeur of Washington's Kennedy Center to the scale of New York City's JFK Airport to the oddity of a Kennedy golf course in Aurora, Colo. (He publicly avoided predecessor Dwight Eisenhower's beloved leisure sport but actually played it well).
"He stands out among all the modern presidents," says historian Larry J. Sabato, whose book, "The Kennedy Half Century," has just been published. "Franklin Roosevelt was more consequential, and Harry Truman may have been, too. But Kennedy overshadows them all. He's the one president from the post-World War II era who could appear on the streets now and fit right in."
Kennedy, born in 1917, was the second son, and one of nine children, of immigrant-turned-tycoon Joseph P. Kennedy. No self-made man put greater pressure on his children than did the elder Kennedy. When first son Joseph Jr. was killed during World War II, Jack became the designated heir. Himself a Navy veteran and survivor of a collision with a Japanese destroyer, he would write to his friend Paul Fay that, once the war was over, "I'll be back here with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into a political advantage."
Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946, at age 29, was a senator by age 35 and was soon being mentioned as a candidate for national office.
"From the time Jack first ran for Congress, his father had taught him everything from wearing a suit and the best way to cut his hair, how to appear youthful and wise and serious at the same time," says David Nasaw, whose biography of Joseph P. Kennedy came out last year. Still, Nasaw described JFK's relationship with his father as a "partnership," in which he didn't hesitate to differ from the elder Kennedy.
JFK was a public figure years before he ran for office. "Why England Slept," released in 1940, was a book-length edition of a thesis he wrote at Harvard about the British in the years before World War II. An introduction was provided by one of the country's foremost image makers, Time magazine publisher Henry R. Luce. "You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come," Joseph Kennedy had advised his sons.
The JFK narrative was well in place for his presidential run in 1960: a handsome, witty and athletic World War II hero and family man who vowed to revitalize the country, which for eight years had been presided over by the grandfatherly Eisenhower.
The multimedia story began in childhood with newsreels and newspaper coverage of the smiling Kennedy brood, and it continued with books, photographs, movies and finally television — notably the telegenic JFK's presidential debates with Republican Richard Nixon.
Questions about the Kennedy image were also in place.
His Pulitzer Prize-winning tribute to political risk and bipartisan statesmanship, "Profiles in Courage," was shadowed by reports that he didn't write it, and the book's authorship remains a subject of debate. Lyndon Johnson, eventually his vice president, spread rumors (later confirmed) that Kennedy suffered from a glandular disorder, Addison's disease. An authorized campaign biography by James MacGregor Burns angered the family when the historian questioned whether JFK was independent of his father and of the memory of his older brother.
"I think you underestimate him," Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Burns. "Jack is a strong and self-sufficient person. If we could just lay to rest those bromides about Dad and Brother Joe. Let me assure you that no matter how many older brothers and fathers my husband had had, he would have been what he is today, or the equivalent in another field."
One of the last presidents to live during an age when private vices were kept private, he was at ease around such photographers as Jacques Lowe and around the crew of documentary maker Robert Drew, whose Kennedy projects included the landmark of cinema verite "Primary" and the film "Crisis," about the 1963 standoff against Alabama's segregationist governor, George Wallace. Award-winning filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, who assisted Drew on the Kennedy documentaries, remembered spending hours in the Oval Office and once being offered a ride in the presidential car.
"I got in the front seat and filmed into the back seat," Pennebaker said. "He was going over something that had happened at the United Nations and was using all these four-letter words, just using unbelievable language. Later on, someone said to me, 'I can't believe you can just film him like that.' But there was no way I was ever going to use it. That was the kind of relationship we had."
Andrew Ball, senior historian at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, noted that the first decade after Kennedy's assassination was defined by the stately "Camelot school" of biography, including former JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger's Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Thousand Days."
But starting in the 1970s, in the post-Watergate era, the Kennedy image was challenged by the findings of congressional committees, by a wave of gossipy best-sellers and by one of the great investigative reporters, Seymour Hersh. His "The Dark Side of Camelot" detailed Kennedy's many sexual affairs, alleged connections to organized crime and attempts to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. When the book came out in 1997, New York Times reviewer Thomas Powers said Hersh's "copious new detail often makes for painful reading," which "can't honestly be ignored."
But during a recent interview, Hersh acknowledged that Kennedy's reputation was intact and that if he'd known the president personally, he might have been charmed, too.
"We like him. He was a cool guy, no question about it," Hersh said. "But he also had a dark side, a really dark side that many people knew about and didn't want to talk about."
Kennedy scandals often run through a cycle of revulsion, then acceptance, even rationalization. Last year, Kennedy was the subject of a best-selling memoir by former White House intern Mimi Alford, an explicit account of the president's extramarital behavior.
Laurence Leamer, author of "The Kennedy Men" and "The Kennedy Women," said Alford's story "sickened" him and made him wonder: "How can you bring that into the picture and feel the same way about him?" Dallek's "Camelot's Court" is a sympathetic book that mentions the Alford affair.
"His frenetic need for conquests was not the behavior of a sexual athlete," Dallek writes. "It was not the sex act that seemed to drive his pursuit of so many women, but the constant need for reaffirmation, or a desire for affection and approval, however transitory, from his casual trysts. It is easy to imagine that Jack was principally responding to feelings of childhood emptiness stemming from a detached mother and an absent father."
Dallek has learned as much about Kennedy as any living historian. A decade ago, his "An Unfinished Life" was a landmark biography that revealed Kennedy's health problems were far more extensive than what was reported in his lifetime. Drawing on medical records long kept sealed by the family, Dallek wrote that Kennedy, who had called himself "the healthiest candidate for president," suffered from a wide variety of ailments and had been prescribed everything from antibiotics to painkillers to antidepressants.
"Schlesinger actually found my revelations interesting," Dallek says, "because they showed Kennedy was a man who struggled mightily with these health problems and yet was so stoic and effective."
Previous biographers had failed to receive permission from a three-man board that included former JFK speechwriter and longtime loyalist Theodore Sorensen, who died in 2010. Dallek's reputation as a fair-minded historian made the difference.
"My argument was, 'Look, it's been 40 years and the health records are in the library vaults. What's the point of keeping them closed forever?'" Dallek told The Associated Press. "They agreed, but Sorensen was resistant and so I went to New York and spent two hours with him in his apartment. Afterwards, he was frustrated because I said there was a cover-up and he said there was no cover-up. But there was a cover-up."
Tom Putnam, director of the Kennedy presidential library, said the family had become much more willing to make materials available. He and Nasaw cite as a turning point the decision years ago by JFK siblings Sen. Edward Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver to allow the historian full access to their father's papers. Publications in recent years include White House tapes, notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Jacqueline Kennedy's memories of her husband's administration, recorded in 1964.
Major additions to Kennedy's story are unlikely, though Dallek says he is still trying to gain access to some tapes from the Kennedy White House and to boxes of Robert Kennedy's papers. Putnam said the library was working "dutifully" to make all material available.
"Sometimes things are closed for personal privacy reasons or documents may have to be declassified. That's standard in the archive community," he said. "But we have opened everything we can. There is no secret room at the library where we keep this hidden trove of materials."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/jfks-image-shines-despite-contradictions-161729449.htmlIf you've upgraded to iOS 7.0.3, you've got a fully enabled version of iCloud Keychain now. Aside from saving your passwords, iCloud Keychain can also help you generate stronger ones and sync them across devices. Here's how:
Before continuing, make sure that you have iCloud Keychain enabled under Settings > iCloud > iCloud Keychain. It won't work if the feature is not enabled inside your iCloud account.
Also be aware that the password generator feature in iCloud Keychain is not compatible with all sites as some either don't support it quite yet or don't want you saving passwords at all. This is probably something that will change over time. So if password generator doesn't show up or doesn't let you save a password, you aren't doing anything wrong. That site just doesn't support it, at least not yet.
That's all there is to it. We expect that we'll see more support for iCloud Keychain over time. For now, you may have a harder time finding sites that show the option until they decide to implement the necessary steps for iCloud Keychain to play nicely.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/POxasR3_F08/story01.htmBy Alastair Sharp
TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's main stock index eked out a small gain in morning trade on Wednesday as strong results from the country's two biggest railways offset losses in energy and mining companies.
Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd
Canadian National Railway Co
The railways should prosper as the economy grows but the potential for growing opposition to their carriage of natural resources was a concern, said Rick Hutcheon, president and chief operating officer at RKH Investments.
"A great deal of the current growth in their earnings is coming from oil-by-rail," he said.
The Toronto Stock Exchange's S&P/TSX composite index <.gsptse> was up 8.63 points, or 0.07 percent, at 13,256.69 by mid-morning. It opened in the red. The index has been on a six-session rally, pushing it to two-year highs.
Energy stocks weighed most heavily, pressured by ample supplies and expectations of a further inventory buildup in the United States, the world's top consumer.
Suncor Energy Inc
CGI Group
(Editing by Nick Zieminski)
With the predictability of Halloween decorations flooding your local CVS, the Tea Party is once again being pronounced dead. Unable to defund Obamacare, unhappy about funding the government, the far right’s nihilist wing has nowhere to go but the grave.
Or so we are told. But in a very seasonal irony, it won’t stay buried.
A worker walks inside the turbine hall of the Sizewell nuclear plant in eastern England in 2006. The U.K. government on Monday announced that French-owned EDF would build the first new British nuclear power station in 20 years.
A worker walks inside the turbine hall of the Sizewell nuclear plant in eastern England in 2006. The U.K. government on Monday announced that French-owned EDF would build the first new British nuclear power station in 20 years.
Britain has approved the construction of the country's first nuclear power station in 20 years.
NPR's Philip Reeves, reporting on the announcement for our Newscast unit, said the move goes counter to a European trend to phase out nuclear power in the aftermath of Japan's Fukushima disaster in 2011.
"Most of Britain's 16 nuclear reactors are coming to the end of their lives. Now the government's inked an agreement with a consortium led by the French company EDF Energy to build two new nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point in southwest England. Two state-owned Chinese companies are expected to have a sizable stake. Anti-nuclear sentiment in Britain is low-key compared to some European nations: Germany's phasing out nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster. But this deal will be controversial. Attention is focusing on China's involvement — and the price. The consortium is footing the massive construction costs in return for a guaranteed fixed price for the electricity it produces — that's far higher than current rates."
But as the BBC notes the announcement isn't legally binding. EDF will make a final decision on the project in 2014. The project also needs European Commission clearance.
Still, the news prompted us to look at nuclear energy use across Europe and elsewhere. Here's what we found:
As has been the case for years, France relies on nuclear power for more than three-quarters of its energy needs. And nuclear power enjoys broad public support in the country — at least until the Fukushima disaster.
But France and now Britain are among the few European states that see nuclear power as playing a significant role in the future. Across much of Europe, it's a different story.
Existing plants are being phased out, including in Belgium and Germany.
Indeed, Germany's goals are far-reaching: It plans to close all nuclear power stations by 2022. The aim, as NPR's Eric Westervelt reported last year, is "to have solar, wind and other renewables account for nearly 40 percent of the energy for Europe's largest economy in a decade, and 80 percent by 2050."
But, there are growing doubts about that timeline, too, as Eric noted:
"The fact is, the post-Fukushima consensus in Germany has given way to growing concerns about rising energy costs. The debate is intensifying over just who will pay for the transition to renewable energy, how it will happen, how fast — and through whose backyards."
Further afield, Japan was a major proponent of nuclear power until the Fukushima disaster. Until 2011, about 30 percent of electricity in Japan came from nuclear sources. The plan was to increase the share to 40 percent by 2017. But last year, just 2.1 percent of Japan's electricity came from its nuclear plants.
Across the country, newly formed task forces made up of local, state and federal law enforcement officers are starting to view what was once seen as run-of-the-mill prostitution as possible instances of sex trafficking.
With support and funding from the FBI and the Justice Department, agencies are starting to work together to identify and rescue sex trafficking victims and arrest their pimps.
The new approach is being hailed by victims of trafficking and their advocates as a much-needed paradigm shift — and, the FBI says, is reaping results.
Ron Riggin, a Maryland State Police sergeant who recently retired from a long career spent searching for missing children and runaways, says he's been aware of the problem for some time, but just hasn't had the resources or cooperation to effectively combat it. The recent infusion of support and coordination from the feds, he says, has been a game changer.
"At this point, there's a federal task force that covers just about every state in the union, as far as I know, so that makes it easy for us when we have interstate cases," Riggin said recently during a Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force sting operation near Baltimore. To tackle the problem, the task force regularly peruses online escort ads, conducts stings, and offers services and support to the women they encounter.
Some sex worker advocates say that the approach is throwing the net too wide and leading to the arrests of too many women who are in control of their situations.
But the feds point to their results as their justification. Since 2008, task forces like the one Riggin is a part of have recovered more than 2,700 sexually trafficked children and convicted more than 1,350 pimps.
Looking For A Sense Of Belonging
The volume of cases is exposing a problem that has long been hidden in plain sight: Child prostitution, or sex trafficking of minors, happens in every state in the country, in poor and rich communities alike. And more often than not, victims are children and are American-born.
"Typically they are not the ones who are highly supervised at home," Riggin says. "I think they are running away from something at home, whether it's emotional or physical abuse or lack of love, or call it what you will. There is usually a reason they are leaving home. They don't have a reason to go to somebody."
The pimps, Riggin says, give the victims the attention and sense of belonging that vulnerable children desire.
The emergence of social media and online escort ads, experts say, has only exacerbated the long-standing problem.
"This can happen in any town," says Ron Hosko, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division. "We've seen it happen in very affluent areas of the country. Each of our field offices has reported these crimes, so we think that it's everywhere."
Last year, Hosko oversaw a team that uncovered a sex trafficking ring in affluent Fairfax County, Va. In that case, gang members recruited several adult women and at least eight high school girls through social media networks and contacts inside local schools. They plied them with drugs and alcohol, and controlled them with violence and intimidation.
Getting To The Local Level
Congress changed the legal definition of sex trafficking in 2000 to include recruiting or transporting a person by force, fraud "or coercion." As minors are legally unable to give their informed consent, anyone under the age of 18 is typically considered a victim.
It wasn't until 2008, though, that federal efforts to bring local protocol more in line with federal law took off. Since then, the FBI and DOJ have pumped resources into training law enforcement officers around the country on what to look for, how to approach potential victims, and how to connect them with services like housing, job training and counseling.
They have also made it a priority to gather evidence needed to prosecute their pimps.
The number of sex trafficking cases investigated and prosecuted at the local level is not yet known, but the FBI is gathering that data for the first time as part of its 2013 Uniform Crime Report.
Advocates, including Suzanne Tomatore of the Freedom Network, a national coalition of anti-human trafficking service organizations, say the new approach is making a difference.
But, she adds, there's still a ways to go — in training officers, in providing resources to those who want to help the victims build new lives and in making sure that victims' rights are protected.
"We all want to do the right thing, but I think it is important that the individual rights come first and [the victims] aren't pressured into cooperating with law enforcement," she says.
Renee Murrell, a victims advocate at the FBI field office in Baltimore, says that just a few years ago, most police departments dealt with these cases as child prostitution and simply put the victims into juvenile detention facilities.
"[A victim] was seen as a delinquent child," she says. "Because they're giving her drugs, so she may have a drug charge. She might get a shoplifting charge. All of that was masked as the issue when the trafficking was really the issue."
Of course, many law enforcement agencies still take that approach.
Hosko says that mindset is still the biggest ongoing obstacle for federal efforts to recast child prostitution cases.
"If a particular local law enforcement officer sees what they perceive as purely a prostitution issue, and they don't dig deeper or take it to the next level, or don't collaborate with someone who is interested in taking it to the next level, it is a revolving door," he says.
Pablo Picasso drew L'Homme au Gibus, or Man With Opera Hat, in 1914.
Pablo Picasso drew L'Homme au Gibus, or Man With Opera Hat, in 1914.
Imagine buying a genuine Pablo Picasso painting valued at $1 million — and paying only $135.
That's the prize if you win the "1 Picasso for 100 Euros" raffle Sotheby's is currently putting on. It's the first time a Picasso has been offered as a raffle prize, and while 100 euros (about $135) isn't cheap for a raffle ticket, at one in about 50,000, your chances of winning are a lot better than the megalotteries a lot of people enter.
Peri Cochin, a journalist and television producer in Paris, explains that the idea for an online raffle came about when she was faced with attending yet another gala charity dinner. She and her mother, who is Lebanese, plan fundraising events for the International Association to Save Tyre, an ancient Phoenician city in Lebanon. Tyre's monuments have suffered from Lebanon's civil wars, and the city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been damaged by urban blight. When Cochin's mother suggested the charity gala, Cochin thought: Not again.
"All those gala dinners," she says. "You go there, you sit and you are really bored very quickly, and you look to your watch and hope that 11 o'clock will arrive quickly and you can go home and be quiet and forget about that dinner."
Cochin wanted to try something new. They came up with the idea for an online raffle that would intrigue people from all over the world, not just the usual suspects at a charity dinner. Cochin knows Olivier Picasso, grandson of Pablo Picasso, who is also a television producer in Paris. Together, they looked for a Picasso drawing, and found Man With Opera Hat. Olivier Picasso, who is writing a biography of his grandfather, says the painting is from 1914, "the peak of the cubism period of my grandfather. It's the second part of the cubism history, when Pablo was more studying how to symbolize things than just to draw them. "
Cochin says many people think the raffle is a joke, but "it's not a joke here," she says. "We're talking serious business."
According to Cochin, they had to work for almost two years to get official authorization. In France, raffles and lotteries are run by the state, so the French Finance Ministry will collect the money and supervise the raffle. The money will go to two projects of the International Association to Save Tyre, both focusing on Lebanese women in need. Cochin emphasizes that this raffle is not just for art aficionados or collectors.
"It's mostly people that are dreaming of something that is not possible to get," she says, "and, all of a sudden, yes, you can maybe have it."
Picasso adds, "You know, there are more chance[s] to win than when you play at the New York Lottery."
The raffle drawing is Dec. 18 at Sotheby's in Paris. If they sell 50,000 tickets, they'll make 5 million euros, or close to $7 million. Even if you take off $1 million for buying that Picasso, it's a pretty good haul for a charity event.
WSOF 6 became official today in Miami, Florida as the fighters hit the scales to make weight for tomorrow’s card. Tomorrow’s welterweight title fight between Josh Burkman and Steve Carl was set with both fighters coming in under the 170-pound limit.
Two main card fighters would miss weight as Marcelo Alfaya and Dan Lauzon would both come in heavy for their respective showings with Jon Fitch and Justin Gaethje.
Be sure to stay tuned to MMAFrenzy for full coverage of tomorrow’s fight card.
WSOF 6 Weigh-In Results:
Main Card
Preliminary Card
*-Fighters were docked a portion of their purses for missing weight
Billionaire trading activist and agitator Carl Icahn yesterday turned the heat up on Apple, saying he would "test the waters" with a proxy fight if the company's board doesn't yield to his demand for an historic $150 billion stock buyback.
Icahn went on a media blitz Thursday, making the proxy fight comment on CNBC, which was preceded by an interview on Bloomberg TV and after he launched a new website, Shareholders' Square Table on which he posted a letter he'd sent to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
[ Also on InfoWorld: 12 "best practices" IT should avoid at all costs. | Cut to the key news for technology development and IT management with the InfoWorld Daily newsletter, our summary of the top tech happenings. ]
In those interviews and his letter, Icahn repeated his demand that Apple boost its share price by buying $150 billion worth of stock, a move he called a "no-brainer."
"We're not in this for the short term, for the quick turn," Icahn said on Bloomberg TV, of his Apple investment, which now amounts to 4.7 million shares or about half of 1 percent of the company. Icahn's holdings were worth approximately $2.5 billion as of the 10 a.m. ET share price. "But Apple's not a bank. Shareholders didn't buy share for Apple to be a bank."
That remark was a reference to Apple's huge horde: As of June 30, Apple held $147 billion in cash, securities and other investments.
Icahn repeatedly said he had no problem with Cook and the Apple management team. "I respect Tim Cook, I think he's doing a fine job. We have no complaints about the management there, as far as what they're doing in technology," said Icahn, who sometimes agitates for management changes at the companies he targets.
But the 77-year-old billionaire -- his current worth of $20 billion put him as the 26th-richest person on the planet, just five spots behind Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, according to Forbes -- had nothing nice to say about Apple's board of directors.
"We're not criticizing Tim Cook, we're criticizing a board that won't do [the buyback]," Icahn said on Bloomberg TV.
In his letter to Cook, Icahn elaborated.
"It is our belief that a company's board has a responsibility to recognize opportunities to increase shareholder value, which includes allocating capital to execute large and well-timed buybacks," Icahn wrote. "Apple's Board of Directors does not currently include an individual with a track record as an investment professional. In my opinion, any further delay in executing the buyback we hereby propose will reflect this lack of expertise on the board."
Icahn has been banging the buyback drum since August, when he revealed on Twitter that he had a "large position" in the company. Since then, he has tweeted about scheduling a dinner with Cook, then after the meal that he had again pressed the chief executive on his $150 billion brainstorm.
Deadspin We're So Sorry, London | Gawker Shepard Smith's Office Romance: A 26-Year-Old Fox Staffer | Jalopnik You Have To Be Insane To Build Your Own Submarine | Lifehacker 7 Things I Wish I Had Known Before Getting Married
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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/G0ClcEYpip4/@barrettRIDGECREST, Calif. (AP) — A man shot two people, one fatally, and then led police on a wild chase through the Mojave Desert with two hostages in his trunk before being killed in a gunbattle with police.
Ridgecrest police were investigating a shooting scene shortly after 5 a.m. Friday where a woman was found dead and a man was found injured, with multiple gunshot wounds. During the investigation, a police officer got a call on his cell phone from the suspect, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said at a press conference. The suspect said he wanted to come to the department and kill officers but, because police had too many guns, he would "wreak havoc" elsewhere. He also told police he has a package for them, but it was unclear what he meant by that.
Nearly two hours later, a sheriff's deputy spotted the suspect's car and a pursuit began over roughly 30 miles of highway, through arid stretches of desert. The suspect ran traffic off the road, firing at least 10 times from inside his black Dodge Dart with a shotgun and a handgun. No motorists were hurt, Youngblood said.
At one point during the chase, which lasted more than 40 minutes, the suspect pulled over and the car's trunk popped open, revealing a man and woman inside. They appeared to shut the trunk, the sheriff said. It's unclear if he opened the trunk or if they opened it from inside. The man then got back in the car and continued driving.
At some point, the man made a threat that he was going to kill the two people in the trunk, Youngblood said.
In the end, the man pulled over again on U.S. 395, turned in his seat and began shooting into the trunk. As many as seven officers opened fire and killed the man.
The hostages were flown to a hospital. Their conditions were unknown, but the sheriff said he believed the two will survive.
The suspect apparently knew all of the victims at the original crime scene in the city of Ridgecrest, about 150 miles north of Los Angeles, Youngblood said.
There was some information that the suspect was using Facebook during the pursuit, but it wasn't immediately clear what the postings were, Youngblood said. Investigators recovered the shotgun and a handgun.
A crime scene was set up along U.S. 395 at Kramer Junction, where two police helicopters landed amid numerous law enforcement vehicles. The CHP said the highway was closed from Kramer Junction for 10 miles north because of the investigation. Youngblood said the highway would likely be closed into the night while the investigation continued.
Schools in Ridgecrest were placed on lockdown as a precaution but were later reopened.
The city of about 27,000 people is adjacent to the vast Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, which sprawls over more than 1,700 square miles of desert. U.S. 395 runs through the western Mojave, below the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada.
Ridgecrest Mayor Dan Clark called the incident disturbing, especially because the small city is relatively crime free.
Strong earnings news from Internet and IT vendors gave a boost to tech stocks Friday, with Microsoft shares touching a six-year high.
The Nasdaq Computer Index rose 8.28 points to 1896.93 Friday, less than 4 points shy of a 12-year high. The last time the Nasdaq Computer Index was at this level was October 2000, as tech stocks were in free fall during the dot-com bust.
A strong earnings report from Microsoft, released Thursday, helped fuel the rise in tech shares.
Microsoft reported record fiscal first-quarter sales, up 16 percent year over year to $18.5 billion, while net income was $5.2 billion, up from $4.5 billion. The report, however, highlighted work the company needs to do in hardware and the consumer market.
Software and services revenue increased 10 percent to $11.2 billion while devices and consumer sales rose 4 percent to $7.46 billion.
The devices and consumer area included some worrying news but also some positive results. In the consumer sector, Windows OEM revenue fell 7 percent year on year, most likely at least partly due to soft PC sales worldwide. Meanwhile, though, sales for Surface tablets increased to $400 million, including a sequential increase in revenue as well as units sold.
Microsoft shares rose to $35.73 Friday, up by $2.01.
Amazon was also a focus for tech investors, after reporting on Thursday an impressive 24 percent jump in revenue year over year, to $17 billion. As it pours money into R&D, marketing and business expansion activities, Amazon, as expected, suffered a $0.12-per-share loss. However, the money appears to be well spent, as Amazon added 9 million customer accounts in the quarter, for a total of 224 million active accounts. The company expanded sales at home and abroad.
Amazon shares rose sharply Friday, increasing by $31.18 to $363.39.
Enterprise software vendors on the whole reported strong results this week. Though SAP’s software sales declined, the company reported strong growth in its HANA in-memory database and cloud businesses, which analysts say is important for growth in the future. The company said Monday that quarterly revenue was up 2 percent year on year to €4 billion (US$5.4 billion), while profit skyrocketed 23 percent to €762 million.
On the downside, software revenue fell 5 percent from the same quarter last year to €975 million. SAP shares rose $0.99 to $79.45 Friday.
SAP’s much smaller, cloud-based competitor, Netsuite, reported a 34 percent increase in sales, to $106.9 million. The relatively young company still reports losses as it spends money to expand its business and this quarter was no exception. Its net loss for the quarter was $16.8 million, a bigger shortfall than $8 million a year earlier.
Storage giant EMC announced mixed results. EMC third-quarter consolidated revenue was $5.5 billion, an increase of 5 percent year over year. However, profit declined from $626 million to $528 million.
“Challenging macro conditions, including a doughnut for US Federal, continue to weigh on sector earnings and EMC’s 3Q13,” Sterne Agee analyst Alex Kurtz wrote in a research note.
EMC’s virtualization technology subsidiary VMware, meanwhile, had more uniformly positive results. VMware sales were $1.29 billion, up 14 percent year over year, while profit increased 67 percent to $261 million.
Though Samsung Electronics is not traded on U.S. exchanges, its healthy earnings report Friday most likely helped fuel an air of optimism on the markets. Though the South Korean company said it experienced “intensifying market competition” in the mobile devices market, it nevertheless managed to drive profit up 25.6 percent year over year, to 8.24 trillion won (US$7.8 billion). Revenue came in at a record 59.08 trillion won, a year-over-year increase of 13 percent.
The flood of earnings reports will start to diminish next week, but a few large tech companies, including Facebook, will be reporting.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is opening a six-week burst of fundraising for Democrats, offering an early look at how he'll frame the messy health overhaul rollout and recent government shutdown for donors and voters ahead of next year's pivotal midterm elections.
After putting political events on hold for about a month, Obama will return to campaign mode Friday in New York, where he'll speak at a top-dollar fundraiser for House Democrats, flanked by film producer Harvey Weinstein and prominent CEOs. He'll then head to another, closed-door fundraiser benefiting the national Democratic Party before returning to Washington.
Earlier Friday, Obama will visit a Brooklyn high school to showcase a rare partnership between public schools, a public university system and IBM that lets students finish high school with an associate's degree in computers or engineering.
His fundraising schedule condensed, Obama will headline at least nine fundraisers before the end of November for Democratic campaign committees. Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are holding their own events. Obama's spree will take him away from Washington more than a half-dozen times, from Florida to Texas to California.
Traditionally, the president is a party's most potent fundraising tool, and the effort isn't without potential reward for Obama. A return of Congress to full Democratic control next year would open the door to sweeping policies Obama would love to enact, but Republicans refuse to consider.
In sporadic fundraisers earlier in the year, when Obama was actively seeking better relations with Republicans, he avoided overt partisanship in his pitch to donors. His message was: I'll work with fair-minded lawmakers from either party, but the more power Democrats have in Congress, the better my chances for success.
But any semblance of comity between Obama and Republicans evaporated during the standoff over government funding and the debt ceiling, when the White House was accusing the GOP of holding hostages and threatening to burn down the house. Republicans' insistence that the government shut down unless Obama agreed to debilitating changes to his health care law made the lack of common ground all too clear.
So the immediate crisis averted, Democrats and Republicans alike are looking to the president's words on Friday for signs of how Obama and his party will cast the bitter fights in Washington as they gear up for 2014 races across the country.
"I recognize that the Republican Party has made blocking the Affordable Care Act its signature policy idea," Obama said this week at the White House. "Sometimes it seems to be the one thing that unifies the party these days."
More Americans blame Republicans than Obama for the 16-day shutdown, giving Obama and Democrats a new bludgeon to hammer Republicans and argue they must be voted out. Just 32 percent of Americans view the Republican Party favorably, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted Oct. 17-20, compared to 46 percent who view Democrats favorably.
The political blow to the GOP from the crisis has made some Democrats more bullish about retaking the House next year — an incredibly tall order that, if successful, would bolster Obama's prospects for achieving his second-term goals.
But at the same time, Obama is weighed down by the calamitous debut of the website for new insurance exchanges, raising the prospect that Obama's health care law will be more of a liability than an asset in 2014 even for Democrats who supported the law.
"I would take our position over theirs any day of the week," said Mo Elleithee, the Democratic National Committee's communications director. "We have been working to give people more benefits and increase their access to affordable health care, while Republicans shut down the government."
After winning re-election last year, Obama vowed to go all-in for Democrats by holding at least 20 fundraisers ahead of the midterm elections. Although Obama had planned to spread events out over many months this fall, Democratic officials say he was forced to put politicking on hold — first by the crisis over Syria's chemical weapons, then by the shutdown-and-debt debacle.
By and large, Democrats have been more successful than Republicans in leveraging the fiscal showdown to raise money, according to fundraising reports released by campaign committees for House and Senate. But Republicans say that's where Obama's usefulness to his party ends. After all, the nation's new health insurance program remains a tough sell even with independent voters, and Obama is personally unpopular in many of the southern, conservative-leaning states holding critical Senate elections next year.
"There's still not one Democrat candidate in a toss-up race who wants him visiting their district, because they know he's not wanted anywhere other than New York, San Francisco or Chicago," said Daniel Scarpinato, a National Republican Congressional Committee official.
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AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
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Follow Josh Lederman on Twitter: http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-10-25-Obama/id-dfb9a2c285ec4abeb02a22038da52bb5COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Penn State coach Bill O'Brien bristles whenever anyone asks him about the Nittany Lions' chief rival.
In his mind, playing at Ohio State on Saturday night is not substantially different from that skirmish with Eastern Michigan back on Sept. 7.
"I have a thing about this. We talk about playing 12 one-game seasons, like every game is important," O'Brien said. "I understand, I totally understand the rivalry thing. But I think everybody is a rival, because everybody comes on the football field and wants to beat you and you want to beat them. So that's a rival."
Maybe that's so, but it's hard for 18-to-22-year-olds not to get amped up over playing the nation's No. 4 team from a neighboring state, with a shot at ending the longest winning streak (19 games) in major-college football.
The Buckeyes (7-0, 3-0 Big Ten) certainly look at the showdown as a rivalry, although Penn State (4-2, 1-1) remains a distant second to Michigan.
"I know they're a rival for us right now," Ohio State linebacker Ryan Shazier said. "I guess they're going to be our No. 2 rival. But right now I'm just looking forward to Saturday."
Here are five things to keep an eye on in the rivalry game that is not a rivalry game:
FRESHMAN TEST: A year ago, Christian Hackenberg was a senior playing QB at Fork Union Military Academy. Now he'll be stepping into one of the toughest environments in college football: Ohio Stadium.
Ohio State's Braxton Miller started as a freshman two years ago and knows what Hackenberg will be up against.
"It's hard," he said. "It ain't easy. It's hard."
Hackenberg has been terrific so far for the Nittany Lions — particularly when throwing to top target Allen Robinson.
"If we get into the pocket like we do against most teams, he might get a little nervous and force some throws," Ohio State DL Michael Bennett said.
TIGHT FIT: The Buckeyes have struggled to cover tight ends, particularly against Iowa's three-TE set last week.
When Penn State and Ohio State last met, the Buckeyes won 35-23 but graduated QB Matt McGloin's two TD passes were both to TEs. Kyle Carter, on the list for this year's Mackey Award as the nation's top TE, caught one of those, and he's back. Jesse James, who is 6-foot-7, and freshman Adam Breneman have also started for the Lions.
"They're very good players, they're big, they make matchup problems for us," Meyer said. "I know that they like to utilize them. If it's not concern No. 1, it's either 1a or 1b."
CRUNCH TIME: The temperatures are expected to just above freezing on Saturday night at the Horseshoe. Cold hands for quarterbacks and receivers may help the Buckeyes, who have a dependable running back in Carlos Hyde.
Hyde has averaged 159 yards rushing and has scored five touchdowns in his last two games. On the first cold night of the football season, he figures to loom large.
"He's obviously one of the better backs in the country," O'Brien said. "It's a huge challenge for us."
PASSIVE DEFENSE: Even though Ohio State has been methodically going through its schedule, it's not as if the defense has been particularly awe-inspiring.
In Big Ten play, the Buckeyes have given up 399, 437 and 375 yards of total offense, while surrendering 26 points a game. In the first half of last week's 34-24 comeback win over Iowa, the Hawkeyes relentlessly pushed around Ohio State defenders for the first half.
"We learned we have to be more of an attacking defense," said freshman DE Noah Spence, who originally committed to Penn State but now plays for the Buckeyes. "Not sitting and waiting for the play to come to us. Attack more. We're going to do that a lot more this week."
TOUGH SLATE: Things don't get a whole lot easier for the Nittany Lions after coming to Columbus. They play only one team with a losing record the rest of the way.
Their final five games: Illinois (3-3), at Minnesota (5-2), Purdue (1-6), Nebraska (5-1) and at Wisconsin (5-2).
One good thing: They can build on a dramatic four-overtime, 43-40 victory over Michigan in their previous game two weeks ago. They have some momentum.
Meanwhile, Ohio State plays at Purdue (1-6), has a bye week, hosts Indiana (3-4) then travels to play the Wolverines (6-1).
This week has Meyer worried enough.
"This is going to be a street fight for us," he said.
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Follow Rusty Miller on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/RustyMillerAP
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-10-25-FBC-T25-Penn-St-Ohio-St/id-009eb529640a4b8baf9b6d4e1e0aef89Amateur storyteller Wang Fengchen performs his art in traditional teahouses, and on the radio. His repertoire includes Judge Dee murder mysteries. Stories about Judge Dee were told orally by storytellers for centuries until they were finally collected in a novel in the 19th century.
Amateur storyteller Wang Fengchen performs his art in traditional teahouses, and on the radio. His repertoire includes Judge Dee murder mysteries. Stories about Judge Dee were told orally by storytellers for centuries until they were finally collected in a novel in the 19th century.
The sleuthing exploits of Judge Dee, a character based on a 7th-century Chinese official, are gripping new audiences as new generations of writers, movie directors and storytellers tell his tale and build on his legend.
Judge Dee was cracking tough cases centuries in China before Sherlock Holmes even got a clue. But perhaps more importantly, his stories continue to inform ordinary Chinese people's understanding of justice and law.
One new Judge Dee tale just hit cinemas in Asia, in IMAX and 3-D. It's directed by veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark.
"The first rule of sleuthing," Dee explains in the film "is that you need a photographic memory. "The second is that you need to closely observe people's speech and facial expressions."
But unlike Holmes, Judge Dee also dabbles in the supernatural. He ventures into the spirit world in search of clues. He gleans information from dreams, and in Tsui's latest film, he battles a sea monster.
It's Tsui's second Judge Dee movie in three years.
"This person is a real historical figure," Tsui said at a news briefing ahead of the film's premier in Beijing. "So we wanted to see how much we could exaggerate his persona, basing the story on the historical background, while creating a heroic figure from our mind's eye."
Based On A Historical Figure
The man known in the West as Judge Dee actually served twice as Prime Minister during the Tang Dynasty under Empress Wu Zetian, the first woman to ever rule China.
Zhang Guofeng, an expert on detective literature at People's University in Beijing, says Dee is famous for having a close but rocky relationship with the empress, and for counseling her to scale back her ruthless political purges.
"The empress was trying to consolidate her political power," Zhang explains. "She had many opponents. So she employed a lot of brutal officials who would extract confessions through torture and accuse people of plotting rebellions. But Judge Dee would often correct the miscarriages of justice she caused."
Hong Kong film director Tsui Hark at a news conference to promote his latest film Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon in Taipei, Taiwan, Oct. 3.
Hong Kong film director Tsui Hark at a news conference to promote his latest film Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon in Taipei, Taiwan, Oct. 3.
Zhang says that stories about Judge Dee were passed down from generation to generation by oral storytellers. And they still are.
Wang Fengchen is a young storyteller who performs both in traditional teahouses, and on the radio.
"Detective fiction is well suited to storytellers' use of narrative suspense," Wang says. "We unravel the plots just like reeling silk off a cocoon."
The oral stories were not written into a novel until the 19th century. In the 1940s, a Dutch author named Robert Van Gulik translated that novel into English.
Zhang, the professor, cautions that entertaining as Judge Dee stories may be, they reflect an ancient legal culture that is incompatible with modern standards of law.
For example, traditionally, China never had a judiciary that was separate from the government. Judge Dee was actually a county magistrate who functioned as detective, prosecutor and judge all rolled into one.
In Judge Dee's day, the justice was in the result – that is, punishing criminals - not in any idea of due process. So when Dee couldn't get his suspects to confess, it was standard procedure to torture them until they did.
"The popularity of this kind of fiction shows that China still has a long way to go to get to the rule of law," Zhang argues. "The ideal of the upright official is not about relying on the law. In the end, it just represents a reliance on officials to solve problems."
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Kenny Rogers still records and performs — when the mood strikes him — but he's glad he no longer lives the life of a pop star.
"I wouldn't be out there today if you paid me," he joked.
Rogers long ago cemented his legacy in the world of popular music, and there will be another reminder of this when he's finally inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame on Sunday with Bobby Bare and the late "Cowboy" Jack Clement. Many believe Rogers' induction is years late since few have done as much to spread country music beyond its once rural borders.
Rogers is remembered for "The Gambler" and other country hits like "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town," but the 75-year-old repeatedly strayed into pop music over the years. Now country is more pop — and popular — than ever, and Rogers had a lot to do with that.
"When I came in it was Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, and then all of a sudden I did "Through the Years" and "She Believes in Me," started working with Lionel Richie and did "Lady" and started working with Barry Gibb and did "Islands in the Stream," and as successful as they were, they weren't what those people thought country music was. I think now they look around and say, 'Whoa, he was a lot more country than we thought.'"
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Online:
http://kennyrogers.com
http://countrymusichalloffame.org
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Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott .
Amazon managed to beat expectations in its third quarter, with net sales of $17.09 billion, and a per-share loss of $0.09, or $41 million. The street had expected Amazon to lose $0.10 per share on sales of $16.8 billion.
In after-hours trading, Amazon is up a strong 7 percent. Investors are clearly heartened by what they see. As Blair Frank of GeekWire points out, however, this is Amazon’s second straight quarterly loss, and the company expects to lose a stunning $500 million in its fourth quarter.
Component to that loss, however, is $350 million for stock-based compensation, and amortization of intangibles. So, the cash loss should be somewhat blunted.
The company is growing like a weed, but not a very profitable weed. Amazon expects its net sales for the coming fourth quarter to land between $23.5 billion and $26.5 billion. Those figures represent a 10 percent to 25 percent year over year gain for the company.
Amazon has around $7.7 billion in cash and equivalents, so it is hardly running low on funds. In its year-ago quarter, on $13.81 billion in net sales, Amazon lost $274 million. So, the quarter is progress of a sort.
The company is infamous for its lackadaisical view towards profits, instead pouring money into growing its various business units. Amazon sells tablets, streams video, delivers all sort of goods — even groceries — while also providing enterprise-grade cloud computing solutions. It’s a diverse firm.
Amazon could slow investment, and reach higher levels of profitability. But not soon, it seems. On the good ship Bezos steams.
Top Image Credit: Carl Malamud
FILE - In this June 9, 2013, file photo provided by The Guardian Newspaper in London shows Edward Snowden, who worked as a contract employee at the National Security Agency, in Hong Kong. Two Western diplomats say U.S. officials have briefed them on documents obtained by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that might expose the intelligence operations of their respective countries. (AP Photo/The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Two Western diplomats say U.S. officials have briefed them on documents obtained by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that might expose the intelligence operations of their respective countries and their level of cooperation with the U.S.
Word of the briefings by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence comes amid questions swirling around overseas surveillance by the National Security Agency, which has angered allies on two continents and caused concern domestically over the scope of the intelligence-gathering.
The two Western diplomats said officials from ODNI have continued to brief them regularly on what documents the director of national intelligence believes Snowden obtained.
The diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the intelligence briefings publicly.
The Washington Post, which first reported on the matter Thursday evening, said some of the documents Snowden took contain sensitive material about collection programs against adversaries such as Iran, Russia and China. Some refer to operations that in some cases involve countries not publicly allied with the United States.
The Post said the process of informing officials about the risk of disclosure is delicate because in some cases, one part of the cooperating government may know about the collaboration, but others may not.
National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the U.S. takes the concerns of the international community seriously "and has been regularly consulting with affected partners." She declined to comment on diplomatic discussions.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — LinkedIn just gave its users another reason to ensure their resumes are up to date. The online professional network has introduced a mobile feature that shows information about people's careers in emails being read on iPhones.
The tool, called Intro, pulls details from the profiles of LinkedIn's more than 238 million users so the recipient of an email can learn more about the sender.
The information will be limited to what the email senders already allow anyone to be seen on their LinkedIn accounts, unless they already have granted the recipient broader access through a connection on the service.
The feature released Wednesday works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail and Apple Inc.'s iCloud when any of them are plugged into the iPhone's built-in email app. LinkedIn Corp. plans to update the feature so it also works with Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook.com and Exchange email. It's available at https://intro.linkedin.com/ .
Intro also works on Apple Inc.'s iPad, although the feature isn't tailored for that device. LinkedIn eventually will release a version of Intro designed especially for the tablet format.
LinkedIn imported the technology powering the Intro feature from its acquisition last year of Rapportive, a startup that had already been mining online social networks to include personal information in correspondence sent to Gmail accounts.
Intro is part of LinkedIn's push to make its network indispensable on mobile devices as more people manage their personal and professional lives on smartphones and tablets.
LinkedIn says about 38 percent of the traffic to it networking services now comes through mobile devices, up from just 8 percent in early 2011. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner predicted Wednesday that mobile devices would be reeling in more than half the service's traffic at some point next year.
As part of its effort to make its network more alluring on mobile, LinkedIn also released a new version of its service's app for the iPad.
LinkedIn's strategy has been paying off since the company went public nearly two-and-half years ago. The Mountain View, Calif. company has consistently been delivering earnings that exceed analyst projections, helping to lift its stock by more than five-fold from its initial public offering price of $45.
The shares shed $3.60 to $241.35 in Wednesday afternoon trading, as the broader markets ticked down..
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-10-23-LinkedIn-Email%20Intro/id-374c55e19a154efda29c761d7542dea2
